Keystone

by Talbot, Luke

  “I know what you are thinking, that we should have continued working on the Clarke with the other agencies all those years ago,” Larue said. “But it just wasn’t feasible. All of our scientific research at the time was in the area of robotic probes and landing craft. We were already tied in to dozens of missions we could barely fund. The mission’s demands, both financially and in terms of human resource, were simply too high!”

  “I understand, Monsieur.” Aside from hundreds of satellites around Earth, the mainstay of the ESA’s business, their only remaining significant scientific venture was the Beagle 4 rover, roaming alone in the cold winds of Mars for the past three years.

  Larue looked at him. “As far as the Clarke is concerned, we barely have one up on the press. We’ll probably have to watch the landing on CNN.” He sneered as he said the acronym.

  “What can I do, Monsieur?” Antunez offered.

  “Give me something to be optimistic about!”

  Antunez looked at his boss with pity. There was nothing.

  Larue returned to the window and held his hands behind his back. The urge to start biting his nails again had grown, but a respectable man restrained himself, he had decided. “Find something,” he said over his shoulder. “Watch everything.” He looked over at the UNESCO building. Education, Science, Culture. It was all there. But above all, he thought, opportunity. “NASA is a business, they only tell us what they want us to know, and then keep the juicy bits to themselves.” His mouth had started to water; he was hungry already.

  “Espionage, Monsieur?” Antunez sounded shocked.

  Larue shot round and pointed a finger at him. “No! Not espionage, but liberty!” A thought was brewing in his mind and he revelled in his new-found enthusiasm. “Mars is not American, we all have the right to it, and this Clarke mission is from Earth, not the United States. NASA have no right to withhold information —”

  “We have no evidence that they have, or will,” Antunez interrupted.

  “They will, Martin, I am sure of it,” he looked his aide in the eyes, an unpleasant grin on his face. “And when they do, you will be watching.”

  Antunez shifted uneasily on the spot. So this is what happens when you push Larue into a corner, he thought. The boss’ job was almost certainly on the line; the honourable thing to do was to resign. Instead, Larue was grabbing at fanciful conspiracy theories.

  “With the feeds we are getting, we are not very well placed…”

  “You will find a way, Martin, I trust you,” he said firmly. He sat down at his desk and started flicking through paperwork intently. The small wrist strap he was wearing sent a small impulse to his nerve endings, telling him it was time to curb his enthusiasm and relax. “And one last thing.”

  “Monsieur?”

  “I trust you have no engagements this evening? I’m sure you understand that, for obvious reasons, we don’t have much time. I want you to get me anything you can, as quickly as possible. I want you to get everything from the Clarke before our control of the nanostations is removed.”

  Martín left the office quietly, realising the meeting was over. In the corridor outside, he bumped into a young blond woman carrying a wad of paperwork. His face flushed.

  “Excuse-moi, Jacqueline,” he mumbled.

  “Martín,” she used the Spanish pronunciation of his name. “You look worried. Can I help?”

  He looked at the network programmer for a few seconds before his neurons clicked into place. “Oui,” he said. Yes.

  Hours had passed.

  Martín watched in silence as the American Captain sailed across the Lounge to meet the Chinese Lieutenant. After a brief exchange of words, too quiet to be picked up by the nearby nanostation, the woman left the Captain by the window. He called after her, this time his voice loud enough to come through Martín’s headphones, but she did not return. He stayed for three minutes, staring into space, before leaving the Lounge.

  He had watched the same recording during a routine run through of the Clarke’s activities the day before, but had thought nothing of it. It now stood out as one of the last recordings during which the ESA had been able to control the nanostations. Had he known, and been awake while it had been live and not tucked up in bed with a woman he barely knew and would probably never see again, he would certainly have moved the tiny little nanostation several feet closer.

  The Clarke’s equipment of nanostations was superb. Over the past weeks, he had been allowed to control some of the little flying machines, sending them this way and that, bumping into walls, getting in the way of the crew. With the number of nanostations active during the day, there were more than enough to go around. He had even seen a feed from a nanostation controlled by someone at JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, which had accidentally strayed into a doorway adjacent to the Hygiene Bay. The video had been cut by NASA just as Dr Jane Richardson had entered with her towel, and control mechanisms for restricting movement of nanostations within the Hygiene Bay and personal Pods expanded to include the connecting tunnel from the Lounge.

  During Nightmode, most of the stations went to the closest charging pad, ready for another busy shift. Unless there was a fault or something needed to be monitored more closely, at these times there were only eight active nanostations – one for each habitable module. The one that had managed to pick up the meeting between Lieutenant Shi Su Ning and Captain Yves Montreaux the previous day had been on the other side of the room, and although at the time five agencies were able to send basic commands to the lonesome vigil in the Lounge, not one had done so.

  He increased the gain on his headphones and flattened the equalizer in the low frequency range; the constant humming of the ship’s air circulation units needed to be cancelled out. Pressing play, he watched the video again.

  “I had no idea you did this,” the Captain’s voice boomed through his headphones. He was trying to pick up the quiet sections, and this meant that everything else now sounded incredibly loud.

  “You may be the Captain, Sir, but with respect you don’t know everything,” she replied.

  A pause while the Captain went across the Lounge to join her. Martín had already seen the look of surprise in the Captain’s face the last time he had watched. But this time he noticed something else; Su Ning had stretched her neck to speak to the Captain. But as soon as she saw his reaction this changed. Martín saw the look in her eyes: she had said too much and knew it. It was a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ detail, hard to pick up from Earth with the angle of the nanostation; but on Clarke, it was obvious that the Captain had not missed a thing.

  “Lieutenant, is everything OK?” he said.

  Up to this part, Martín had always been able to hear everything. The section that he had not been able to decipher was about to begin. He leant forward in his chair, as if being closer to the screen would help. Neither person’s lips could be seen, so even if he had been able to lip-read, it would have been useless. Pressing the headphones hard against his ears, he listened intently.

  The sound was terrible, but he still managed to get several syllables. He stopped the video and played the section back, writing down the bits he could hear on a piece of paper in front of him. Stopping the video again, he looked down at what he had written:

  “I…it…is…an…shoe…Sir….wood…ree…with…thing…less.. was…tain.”

  It didn’t make any sense, but he circled the word ‘Sir’, as the only whole word he was sure of; the Chinese Lieutenant was by far the most polite of all the crew members, and always used formal forms of communication.

  He was about to play the video again when there was a light tap on his shoulder.

  “Still nothing?” Jacqueline asked sympathetically.

  He removed the headphones and turned to face her. “Not yet, I’m afraid, but I am getting there, I have half a sentence.”

  He passed her the piece of paper with the scribbled, fragmented sentence and she took it with interest, reading through it several tim
es before passing it back to him. “My English is not very good, but I’m pretty sure that means nothing at all,” she smiled at him. “You look tired, Martín, take a break and let me show you something.”

  It was raining in the darkness outside, the day’s clear skies long forgotten. He checked his watch and saw that he had been sitting at his desk watching various feeds from the Clarke for over eight hours. It was ten o’clock in the evening, and it had already been a long night.

  “OK,” he said standing up reluctantly. “What have you found?”

  Chapter 17

  Montreaux sat in the Command Module and looked at the closed hatch that led to the pod that would take them to the surface of Mars. Stencilled across the hatch in military font were the letters “M.L.P.”: Mars Lander Pod. A plan was forming in his mind, but he knew it wasn’t a very good one.

  Wait until we land on Mars, he thought to himself, and the nanostations will be left behind. The little flying stations only functioned in zero gravity, and would therefore not follow the crew down. On-board the MLP there were fixed monitoring stations, dotted around the pod and its exterior, that would send streams of data back to the Clarke and Earth, but he could already imagine a situation where he would be alone with the Lieutenant and be able to have a conversation in private; it depended on them both leaving the landing site in protective suits, a normal part of the mission plan, and travelling far enough to be out of range of the MLP’s shortwave antenna. With the little power they were able to use on the surface, a handful of kilometres would be amply sufficient. One of the first duties on the surface was to set up signal booster stations at regular intervals, so that they could travel further. He would need to make sure that they were not in the range of one of those, too, or that they had their chat before the boosters were assembled.

  As he listed all of the problems facing such a scenario, the thought that the plan was not very good grew, until he was ready to scrap the idea completely.

  And what if it’s too late? The look on Su Ning’s face the previous night had been with him ever since. What if whatever is worrying her is too big to be left another six weeks?

  His mind was reeling. He had never usually been impressed by conspiracy theories, but the pieces were beginning to fit in an increasingly worrying puzzle. A multinational mission to Mars, the first of its kind, almost at its destination. An ultra-patriotic American scientist intent on planting her flag in new territory. A Russian MIG-34 pilot as second in command. And the youngest member of the crew: a Chinese army Lieutenant. Then out of the blue after over two months in space, the Chinese Lieutenant raises his suspicions. Something is wrong, either with the mission, the crew, both, or something entirely different. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound personal. What had she said again? I am not sure it is an issue and would not worry you with anything unless I was certain.

  And then, as if that cryptic message wasn’t enough, the inexplicable behaviour of Mission Control. Surely if Su Ning has a problem it is as important to them as it is to us?

  He needed space. Space to think, and the Command Module simply wasn’t giving it to him; he knew that at that moment, as many as twenty nanostations could be watching his every move, every blink, every bead of sweat. He looked in the air around him and fancied he could make out the movement of a couple of them, like twenty first century mosquitoes, except that they didn’t bite. Or did they? He laughed to himself, now he felt crazy, and probably looked it too.

  He shifted in his seat, running his eyes over the panels of instruments in front of him. Time to act normally, he thought to himself. If Mission Control want to keep him in the dark, then it would be best if they think that…

  In the dark! Nightmode! With the majority of the nanostations inactive, he only had one per module to avoid.

  He unclipped himself and carefully made for the exit. The short tunnel from the Command Module to the Lounge was directly behind the seat he had been using, and he reached it with a single short tug. Emerging into the Lounge, huge by comparison, he could see the back of Dr Richardson’s head; she had assembled her laboratory along one wall and was writing some notes on a clipboard.

  On the opposite side of the room, Lieutenant Su Ning was sitting on the sofa, playing cards with Captain Marchenko. She looked over her cards at him as he entered the room, her eyes showing candour that he had never before seen.

  “I see your twenty and raise you fifty!” Marchenko told her.

  The brief moment of understanding between the Chinese woman and Montreaux dissipated instantly as she returned to her game with the Russian.

  “I see you for fifty, Captain Marchenko,” she said flatly, laying three sixes and two aces on the table.

  “Full House? No way!” he complained, before showing his hand. “It’s a good thing I had four of these, isn’t it?” He laughed at the look of dismay on Su Ning’s face as he placed the set of kings on the table carefully. “Do I win?” he asked cheekily.

  Su Ning pushed her chips across to him, catching one that had left the table’s surface and was now spinning above her hand. “You win, Marchenko, this time.”

  Montreaux pushed across to the sofa and clipped himself in between the Russian and Su Ning.

  “Mind if I play?”

  Chapter 18

  Martín gripped the Styrofoam coffee cup in his hand and looked down into the dark swirl of liquid that the machine had given him. It smelt like coffee, but he knew from experience that it carried a bitter metallic aftertaste.

  Sitting down in front of him, Jacqueline had been typing and clicking at her computer for five minutes now, in silence. He barely understood half of the functions she was using, and the other half may as well have been in Hebrew for all he knew. Her work was punctuated by short sighs and clicks of the tongue when what she was trying to achieve didn’t work. She would then try another method, still without saying a word.

  Eventually, she pushed her chair away from the desk and looked up at Martín, who was standing behind her.

  “There. What do you think?” she said triumphantly.

  He looked up from the depths of his drink and squinted at the screen. He took a step towards her desk. The display was split into two sections, left and right. Running from top to bottom on the left hand side, in green text on black background, were dozens of lines of programming code. Every second or so, a different section would flash bold for a moment, as if to inform the user which part was being used. The right hand side displayed two video feeds, in black and white. Both feeds showed the Clarke’s Lounge, but were somehow different. As he watched he saw the top view of the Lounge pan round, until he could see Captain Montreaux, Captain Marchenko and Lieutenant Su Ning sitting at the table playing what looked like poker. Montreaux was collecting the chips from the table, while Marchenko was already dealing another hand.

  “Five Card Stud, I think,” Jacqueline informed him.

  The video feed directly below it showed the same Lounge, but at a different time. As he looked at it, he saw Captain Montreaux enter the room from the Command Module. Martín’s mouth dropped open as he watched him cross the room, clip himself down on the sofa, and join the game of poker that he was already playing in the feed above. He moved closer to the screen and studied the code on the left.

  “Seventy-five minutes precisely,” she told him.

  “Precisely what?” Martín looked at her.

  She looked at him and then tapped the display with the nail of her index finger, first the top feed then the bottom one. “Seventy-five minutes precisely between the feed coming back from the Clarke and the feed being sent to us by NASA.”

  Martín didn’t know what was more impressive: that Jacqueline had managed to hack into the original data stream herself within four hours, or that security and encryption at Mission Control eight-thousand kilometres away was so lax as to let such a hack occur.

  “So they’ve added a delay to the feed they’re sending us?” he asked.

  “Yes, although I don’t
know when it was introduced, obviously I only know it’s effective now.” She looked back at the screen and the programming code she had spent hours putting together.

  “It doesn’t entirely surprise me,” he said, despondently. “Our partner status has been downscaled, so they’ve probably downgraded our feed, too. How long will we have the direct feed?”

  “I don’t know, I’m amazed it’s still there, to be honest.”

  “And you’re recording all of this?” he asked, watching the screen intently. In the delayed feeds, Captain Marchenko had just lost most of his chips, while at the same time in the live one he had already won most of them back again.

  She pointed to a little red flashing icon in the bottom left hand corner of her screen and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “But it’s only useful to you and I as we stand here watching. In an hour and a quarter practically anyone will be able to see this feed, so we don’t exactly gain anything.”

  As she said this, the top feed started to move across the Lounge. He looked at Jacqueline in earnest.

  “We can’t control anything, sorry. And even if we could, we wouldn’t want to. If they haven’t realised that we’re watching yet, sending commands to a nanostation is a sure-fire way of putting them on the right track.”

  He nodded in agreement. He hadn’t thought of that at all. The nanostation was clearly going to recharge anyway, as it headed for the corner of the Lounge and slowly dropped onto the available induction plate. Just as the screen went blank, Jacqueline sat upright and typed quickly on the keyboard for several seconds.

  “What is it?” he urged.

  She left him waiting for almost five minutes before replying. When she did, the screen had changed, this time completely full of programming code.

  “You say that the delay is because they downgraded our partner status, but I didn’t tell you the best bit,” she said. She was enjoying her brief spell as a technological spy.